Plundering Satan’s House

Jesus has power over Satan's kingdom; Christ reveals His grace by delivering people from demonic influence to serve the living God.

Scripture: Mark 3:7-35

Sermon Notes:

Christ enters creation and demonstrates His Lordship over it.

Blindness to who Jesus truly is enslaves us; it is one of the many things from which Christ has come to set us free.

When modern Christians come to Scripture, and especially to the gospels, we see clearly that Jesus is depicted as the Son of God, but the first-hand witnesses did not often see things from that perspective.

The error that modern Christians tend to fall into is to minimize the humanity of Jesus.

In calling the twelve disciples, Jesus demonstrates that a personal, relational contact with a small group of people is necessary, not just influence over a large crowd.

There is a two-fold purpose to the calling of the disciples: to be with Jesus, and to be sent out by Him as apostles.

To rightly fulfill our office, we must recognize that we cannot serve God unless we have first been with Christ (cf. Acts 4:13).

Many people besides the 12 disciples spent meaningful time with Jesus.

We often overlook how blessed we are as a called-out people who have had our hearts opened to receive the Word of God and to be changed by it.

The apostles are the foundation of a new people of God, in Jesus Christ, the last Adam.

To speak of redemption pre-supposes that something has been lost.

As God’s image-bearers, our redemption takes the form of being transformed to the image of Christ, who is Himself the image of God (cf. Rom. 8:29; Col. 1:15).

Being an image-bearer is essential to our being. In our apostasy, we can distort the image of God in us, but we can never escape it.

Jesus was fully man and fully God, and He perfectly shows us what it means to bear the image of God.

God alone has the prerogative of making an image of Himself. This is why the Second Commandment forbids idols – God has already made His image.

When man substitutes his image of himself for the image of God, alienation is inevitable.

To say that we bear the image of God does not mean that we are divine; we are sacred, however, representing God to one another.

Anyone who does not serve God by faithfully bearing His image is implicitly an idolater, and therefore a prisoner of Satan, the first idol-maker.

All of us are called into a vocation, which is to say we are called into service to Christ the King.

The world displays serious arrogance in claiming to administer and remake reality in its own image; Christians must understand that our authority is only valid as long as it reflects the image of God.

Our authority is the authority to serve, to set lives free by the power of God; this is the service that plunders the prison of Satan.

When we attribute the grace of the gospel to something evil, we place ourselves under condemnation.

Application Questions:

What are some implications of Jesus’ nature as fully God and fully man?